Dave Johnson

Executive Vice President, IT DivisionSchneider Electric

Dave Johnson is the Executive Vice President of the IT Division, Schneider Electric. The IT Division provides complete physical infrastructure solutions for data centers, distributed IT environments, and industrial applications. In his position, Dave is responsible for leading all global functions including strategy, commercial operations, marketing, R&D, supply chain, finance, and human resources. He manages teams in numerous countries across Asia, Europe, The Middle East, Africa and the Americas, driving overall growth and profitability. Dave’s previous leadership roles have included Senior Vice President of Data Center Systems, Senior Vice President of Home & Business Networks (2007-2012), Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing (2006 – 2007).

Our moderator, Cole Crawford will lead our plenary speakers in a debate on the impact of high value IoT applications such as driverless cars and the latest technology drivers and architectures which are set to significantly change the global data center form factor.

High-value IoT applications need networks that can respond in real-time. They need the power of cloud computing at the edge of the network. By 2020 the billions of connected devices will require streaming and real-time data computed at endpoints. The driverless car is transforming itself into a data center on wheels, and sending data in real-time to the cloud is today still a challenge due to limited upstream bandwidth availability. This requires us to think beyond centralisation and cloud and towards location and distributed processing. 5G is around the corner. Edge is here and it's only set to get bigger. How are current cloud architectures stacking up? How will edge localisation strategies be defined from a power and connectivity standpoint? How will AI transfer to the edge? How do we secure our networks in the mobile era? In other words what will this 180 sharp turn impact the data center ecosystem?